Writing about aliens — feedback?

Glad you like it!

[QUOTE=Gagundathar]
Nori I wish you all the best on your quest.
When I was about your age, and working as a computer scientist (yes, that early), when asked what I wanted to be when ‘i grew up’ I would answer, ‘I want to be a science fiction writer’.

I apparently haven’t grown up yet, but I have two or three stories in the incubator.
Keep at it. Read and write. Posting here hones your narrative skills. But, write every day. Even if just a few sentences or a paragraph or two.
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Oh, trust me, I do. (And did horribly on most of my college courses because of that, but that’s another story… :P) I spend most of my time thinking about or writing about my stories. And you would not believe how little progress I make doing that. XD But it’s better than no progress.

I find that once I get past the few small plot points and bits of dialogue that come to me almost right away, I hit a wall and can’t think of anything else — I can’t fill in the gaps. Then I end up spending the next two years mostly modifying what I already have while adding very little. Luckily I have a lot of stories on the go right now, so when my inspiration for one story starts to wane, I find that I start getting inspiration for another, so I’m always working on something. Case in point: This isn’t the story I’ve been mostly working on, and it hasn’t been for quite a while. But the other day my brain just started coming up with stuff so I had a two-day writing frenzy. It’s kind of come to a halt again but I made a good change that I’m kicking myself for not thinking of earlier, because it makes way more sense and actually makes it easier to proceed to the next part of the plot. XD Plus I managed to add a lot of exposition. It was mostly on-the-spot stuff that I didn’t really think about before writing, so I might have to change a lot of it (for instance, much of what I wrote was based on the assumption that my aliens are afraid of the dark, which I’ve pretty much scrapped, so I’ll have to delete/modify those parts), but I really like how it’s turned out because it gave me ideas. Am I making any sense? XD

Still, I wish my brain would come up with better ideas, faster. Some people are just so damn creative, whereas my brain’s like, “Ummmm… Yeah, sorry, no original thought here.” XD

[QUOTE=Gagundathar]
Doing makes it real. There is nothing that can replace it.
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I know exactly what you mean. :smiley:

[QUOTE=Gagundathar]
When you get an idea, write it down. Either on your computer or on paper. Do not delay. Memory degrades and shifts. That isn’t a bad thing but it is a real thing.
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Yeah, is it ever. Ugh. XD I do write all the time, though. I take my laptop everywhere I go and most of what I do is thinking about or writing about my stories. I even downloaded an application called “Thoughtback” specifically to write down new ideas that aren’t fully formed yet, just little thoughts that I have. And whenever I find pictures that remind me of something or look like something in my stories, or really good quotes that relate to my stories, I save those, too, because I’m so afraid of losing them otherwise. XD

[QUOTE=Gagundathar]
If you dream about this stuff, like I do, then keep a dream journal.
[/QUOTE]

I don’t generally remember my dreams when I wake up, and I don’t usually dream about my stories. But I daydream about them all the time. Unfortunately, often when I have those kinds of ideas that are really small but really awesome, it’s either when I’m starting to fall asleep, or the few times when I’m not in a position to write them down. XD I need to start keeping a pen and paper with me.

[QUOTE=Gagundathar]
Even a few words scribbled down when you get up to go to the bathroom at 0230 can prove to be a key to hidden gems in your mind. If nothing else, it will make going to the bathroom more interesting. :slight_smile:
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LOL.

[QUOTE=Gagundathar]
Honestly, I wish you the very best on your quest. Your concepts, though not completely formed, are intriguing.
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Thanks!

[QUOTE=Gagundathar]
I love the concept of a ‘timeless’ culture. We have them here on Terra as well. Do you know that? There are still scattered hunter-gatherer tribes who have no words for days of the ‘week’.
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That doesn’t surprise me. A week is…well, it’s not “arbitrary”, per se, but when you think about it, it’s kind of weird that we have names for each day of the week, or that we measure our time with a number of days that’s not only odd but prime, and that isn’t even a factor of the number of days in the year. If I were designing a calendar, I’d have five-day weeks, because at least then the year would be evenly divisible by the days in a week.

My alien planet’s sidereal year is so short (37 Earth days) that it might be their equivalent of a “month” or “week”, if they even have such a concept, and they probably don’t measure time in anything bigger than that unless it’s a really long amount of time (like on the scale of lifetimes).

I don’t want time to be irrelevant to them, but I want them to think of it differently and relate to it differently. The fact that they don’t sleep, and that they live a long time even by Earth standards (so their 37-day year might be short enough to them to even qualify as just a “day”), plays a huge role in that. In a culture where days aren’t divided up into discrete units, how do you regulate work schedules? On Earth, we have designated sleep time and designated work time, and our biology even uses external cues to dictate when we feel tired and when we feel awake. My aliens don’t have separate times dedicated to work or sleep — you just keep doing whatever until you get tired, then you rest, then you keep going. And even when you’re resting you might still be doing something productive but less demanding. And if everyone gets tired at different times and rests for different lengths of time, how do you synchronize things?

But the thing is, this concept is only a problem from our perspective — the aliens evolved that way, so it would just be normal for them, and their societies would reflect that. But I, being human, have a hard time knowing how their society would work compared to ours, as far as time goes. That’s why I have to get inside their heads, which is understandably rather difficult.

It especially sucks when I’m writing their dialogue in English, because I don’t know how to translate certain things in a way that highlights the linguistic and conceptual differences, without being too difficult for a hypothetical reader to understand. Like, when they mention units of time, should I use their units, or ours? If I do the former, then the reader won’t know how that unit converts to human time units, but it will give a genuinely alien perspective, which is my goal; if I use the latter, the perspective won’t be alien enough (not to mention that the translation won’t be strictly accurate), but the reader will understand what I’m saying. I try to avoid just explaining to the reader what a thing means because then I’m not speaking from an alien narrator’s perspective, I’m speaking from a human narrator’s perspective, and I don’t like to switch back and forth. It’s awkward (because I start sounding like Lemony Snicket), and it’s not my goal. Grah. Some authors are so good at narrating from an alien perspective while still being easy to understand. I would love to know how they do it. I guess it helps if you’re using first-person narration, because then it doesn’t sound weird when the viewpoint character explains stuff. That’s how John Patrick Lowrie did it. But I don’t use first-person narration in this story, and I don’t just have one viewpoint character, either. I guess the reason it sounds so awkward to explain stuff in the narration is that I tend to use free indirect speech as my narration style, which is about as close to first-person narration as you can get without actually using first-person narration. But when I explain stuff, it suddenly becomes third-person omniscient, when it’s supposed to be third-person limited; and the difference is particularly glaring when you’re using free indirect speech. Basically, I don’t know how to narrate, is the point I’m making here. Grah.

Wow, I did not expect to be writing that much there. Phew.

Anyway… Do those tribes you mention have words for other units of time aside from days of the week?

[QUOTE=Gagundathar]
You might wish to study them as well.
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I will do that. :smiley:

[QUOTE=Gagundathar]
Please keep us posted on your work.
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How posted? What kinds of things should I keep y’all posted on?

But even when I do have basic knowledge of something, it’s not enough for me to do anything useful with it. I also know that warm air rises, and that storms form where different air masses meet, but when I start trying to apply that knowledge to the scale of a whole planet’s climate in a bajillion different regions, there are too many variables for me to possibly apply my teensy bit of knowledge and get a plausible answer. I need more than that. I need to actually know what I’m talking about.

[QUOTE=Balance]
For an example, take the glassward plant I described in my post. It’s pretty obvious what the fungoid gets out of the symbiotic relationship–it gets a structure to inhabit where it can get periodic doses of radiation, and it gets fed sugars from photosynthesis the rest of the time. Something I didn’t go into, though, is what the green plant gets out of it–so think about it. Come up with some way the fungoid can contribute. Since it’s fictional, there is no “right” answer, you just want to come up with a plausible one using what you know about plants.
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That’s just it — I don’t know enough about plants to know if my answer is plausible or not. I have no freaking clue what a fungoid could contribute to the relationship. I don’t know anything about fungi. I can do more research, but then I just start getting confused trying to keep everything straight in my head.

Well, okay, how’s this — maybe the fungoid releases a chemical, or something, that wards off predators? Or maybe it attracts pollinators? (I don’t know if your plants have pollinators.)

But then that’s where I start thinking, “Can fungi even do that? How would that work? I have no clue how that would work.” And then I come to a grinding halt. I can’t just say that something does something, I need to know how, because if I don’t, then how do I know if it’s plausible or not? And if I don’t know if something’s plausible, I don’t like to include it. :frowning: That’s the problem I encounter with most of my ideas.

[QUOTE=Balance]
Pick a bit character from something you’re reading, someone you know almost nothing about. Make up a little backstory for them–what their job is, why they’re present where they are–based on what you do know. Speculate about where they’re going after the scene is over. Maybe they’ll turn up again later, and you can see how close you came to what the author intended, but that’s not as important as the mental exercise.
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That’s a good idea! I’ll do that.

[QUOTE=Balance]
If you read an article about an animal with an unusual trait, try to come up with a reason why the trait is (or was) a competitive advantage.
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Ooh, I love doing that. Evolution fascinates me. I love to think about weird traits humans have and think, “I wonder how that may have benefitted us at one point.”

[QUOTE=Balance]
Again, it doesn’t really matter if you’re right, since you’re not doing zoological research. It’s just something to train your analytical abilities. It’ll help you devise more believable fictional critters.
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Mmmk. I’ve been trying to come up with traits for my aliens based on that kind of thing, evolutionary stuff… And I ended up with dark-fearing aliens that turned out to not be all that plausible at all. XD I guess I need more practice. :stuck_out_tongue: The thing is, in order to know the kinds of evolutionary pressures my organisms have had, I need to know the history of what my planet has looked like, and I haven’t gotten nearly that far in the worldbuilding yet. I haven’t even really come up with any organisms aside from my sapient aliens. All I know about the plants is that they’d be black to absorb the scant amount of radiation coming from the sun.

[QUOTE=Balance]
Above all, I want to encourage you to keep at it. You have a good, creative mind, and that is a joy in itself. I hope you make the most of it.
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I will!

Thanks for all your advice. I know it seems like I rejected most of it, but I really didn’t, I just need more help figuring out how to use it.

That’s why you practice with small things; it builds up your logic muscles for the heavy lifting. If the problem overwhelms you, simplify it. When I was pondering climate, I didn’t include mountains and terrain at first. I started with a featureless ball, covered with water. I ignored things like the poles being cooler even without axial tilt. I pared it down to something I could easily hold in my head, and went from there. Once I had the general picture, I could add in local things like mountains and think about what those would do.

Here’s a dirty little secret: the author gets to cheat. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s your world, and you can add to it as you go. If you come up with something, and somewhere down the line, it turns out that it doesn’t work, you can add things to fix it. If your weather doesn’t work, you can add a mountain range nearby to tweak it. The blank spots on your “map” are your safety net. Larry Niven–a highly regarded writer of hard science fiction and a guy with astrophysicist buddies who can whip up pages of equations describing his latest FTL drive–created the Ringworld, a vast artificial structure on which numerous intelligent species evolved. After the novel was published, someone pointed out that the structure was unstable, and would have crashed into its star long ago. (I’ve heard that MIT students walked the halls, chanting, “The Ringworld is unstable!”)

What did Niven do? He wrote another novel that explained why it hadn’t crashed.

Getting it right is good–but so is getting it done.

Perfectly plausible answers. There’s no reason the fungoid couldn’t secrete defensive or attractive chemicals–or even offensive ones, that kill animals that approach too closely and provide “fertilizer”. Certainly fungi on Earth often carry nasty poisons, but even if they didn’t, there’s no reason the fungoid couldn’t. My answer, by the way, was that the fungoid extracted minerals and other nutrients from the soil for the benefit of both…which is neither better than your answer nor worse.

That’s basically exactly what my fear is. >< I’m afraid that if I start out too simple, and then start building my whole world around what I’ve got, I’ll eventually find out it wouldn’t work and that most of my story is based on something not even remotely plausible. That would make me cry.

But I guess I’ll have to get over that fear or I’ll never get anywhere. XD I like what you say about building up my logic muscles for the heavy lifting. :stuck_out_tongue:

[QUOTE=Balance]
What did Niven do? He wrote another novel that explained why it hadn’t crashed.
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Oh dear Lord. ><

[QUOTE=BalanceGetting it right is good–but so is getting it done.[/QUOTE]

You’re right. I’ll never get anywhere if I’m too hung up on getting every single little thing right.

[QUOTE=Balance]
Perfectly plausible answers. There’s no reason the fungoid couldn’t secrete defensive or attractive chemicals–or even offensive ones, that kill animals that approach too closely and provide “fertilizer”. Certainly fungi on Earth often carry nasty poisons, but even if they didn’t, there’s no reason the fungoid couldn’t. My answer, by the way, was that the fungoid extracted minerals and other nutrients from the soil for the benefit of both…which is neither better than your answer nor worse.
[/QUOTE]

Coolie. :slight_smile: I think I like these little mental exercises. They get the creative juices flowing.

Thanks so much for your wisdom. It’s much appreciated. :')

Pulse? When I was in boy scouts, counting 72 resting heartbeats was how we guesstimated a minute had passed.

Someone else (Nava, I think) mentioned that as well. I don’t know enough about my aliens’ biology to know if they’d even have something akin to a pulse. Even if they do, a pulse is fine for short stuff like seconds or minutes, but what about longer things?

Speaking of Niven, he wrote a story set in a orbiting tree called ‘The Integral Trees’ (since they were shaped by the environment to look like the symbol for an integral. Their unit of time was ‘breaths’. If your aliens breath, maybe this could be useful.

Interesting. I’ll have to look more into this “Integral Trees” thing to fully get what you’re talking about. I’ll look into it. Thanks.

I’ve thought about this particular subject a lot, myself. I had in mind a story about a colony of humans who were stranded on what’s basically an infinite plain, with the “sun” always directly overhead. The world has no metal which can be mined, so all technology is based on wood, water, and (eventually) ceramics. Anyway, what I came up with is that each tribe has a “timekeeper”- someone who has a better-than-average sense of time, who keeps track of the passage of time, both internally and with waterclocks… that’s their entire job. When tribes meet up, the timekeepers from each tribe compare notes and synchronize with each other.

However, with your world… maybe your aliens never evolved a sense of time at all? Maybe they view their existence as “one thing after another”- time for them would be a linear progression. “Eat. Talk to Bob about hunting. Weave. Eat. Make zug-zug. Bathe. Eat.”

They wouldn’t be able to meet up at a specific time, obviously; synchronizing their clocks would be impossible because they wouldn’t *have *clocks. They’d be chronically late- except there would be no concept of lateness.

Good luck wrapping your brain around it.

Yeah, that’s an interesting concept, but I can’t really work with that. :stuck_out_tongue: They need a sense of time to do science, let alone do space exploration. And without a sense of time how would they refer to past events? They’d have no way of distinguishing something that happened ten minutes ago from something that happened ten years ago. I can see their early ancestors having no sense of time, so I can use the concept in that way, but eventually they’d need to develop one. I guess this is partly a personal limitation — their society can’t work that way because I can’t figure out how to make it work that way.

Balance gave me the libration idea (although after looking it up I’m not sure if it would work), and I’m sure if I think hard enough I can come up with an appropriate external cue. What will make it different is that it won’t be a day-night cycle and they’ll likely organize their time measurements in different ways (i.e. different from day-week-year-etc.).

Maybe I should look up time on Wikipedia. It may have some info as to how cultures function using different senses of time.

I don’t think is that unusual. Humans for most of history had nothing but days. They would have recognized the seasons before being able to count the days. But our obsession with time is a modern phenomena. Before railroads all travel times were relative. The industrial revolution changed ideas of productivity, and later the stop watch did the same. But humans long toiled in indefinite time periods. How much firewood you split in a day wasn’t a fixed quantity.

I heard an anecdote somewhere about the change affected by time and motion studies. Before then, workers did things in the time that was taken. Particular rates of productivity weren’t established. The human view of time has greatly altered over… well over time itself. But much of our views of time are still based on the easily observable, and fairly consistent cycle of day and night. I can see Nori’s aliens regarding time as a factor for science and technology, but unimportant philosophically. They could be a species which cares more about quality and substance than productivity. They may not expect to be able to sync their actions or find a need to do so. A highly cooperative species where individuals step up as needed without individual competetion and territorialism may work better than our own.

Just pointing this out because there’s so much room to play with in this area.

Also, Nori, Robert L. Forward’s *Dragon’s Egg *is an excellent look at the idea of a time scale, and size scales as well, grossly different from ours.

Precisely right.

[QUOTE=TriPolar]
They may not expect to be able to sync their actions or find a need to do so.
[/QUOTE]

Well, but they’d need to if they’re doing something scientific, like building a space ship. Or a building. Or improving the education system. Or a lot of the things they like to do on a regular basis.

My aliens don’t care about time in the same way that we do, but they still care about it. In their education system, for instance, they let everyone go at their own pace, and what they care about is whether the student has learned what they’re supposed to have learned. They don’t care about barrelling everyone through the system…but at the same time, they don’t want someone to take half a lifetime getting through.

[QUOTE=TriPolar]
A highly cooperative species where individuals step up as needed without individual competetion and territorialism may work better than our own.
[/QUOTE]

Are you a mind-reader? XD That’s basically exactly what my aliens are like. :stuck_out_tongue: That’s because my story is basically an Author Tract, a satire on how Humans Are Bastards and Morons (although I don’t want it to be Anvilicious or too forced). I’m basically projecting my idea of what society should be like onto an alien civilization. So a lot of the differences are transferable to human society, in which case it’s me saying, “Why can’t humans do this/be like this?” For instance, the aliens see it as totally wrong to perform harmful experiments on non-sapient animals, because they can’t give informed consent. If and when they do harmful experiments, they do it on their own people (with consent, of course), which they see as way more forgivable (though still not strictly “moral”) than doing it on animals. That’s partly due to different psychology (their disgust response is based on their moral reasoning, whereas with humans it’s usually the other way around), but the underlying morals still apply to humans. And some of the differences aren’t transferable, in which case it’s me saying, “What if there were people who were like this?” For instance, the aliens probably wouldn’t have a problem with sterilizing disabled people; it wouldn’t be seen as repulsive to suggest it, and most disabled people would give their consent willingly (because they’d see it as the responsible thing to do). Such differences are just because their psychology is different, not me saying “Humans should be like this.” It’s more of a comment on how morals can be subjective — if your species’ psychology and biology is different, then what’s right and wrong will be different. If people could come back to life every time they were killed, with no strings attached (no short- or long-term consequences), then killing wouldn’t be wrong, and in fact it might be a sport (like deathmatch. Lol). That’s the other side of the coin that is my story’s premise. XD

[QUOTE=TriPolar]
Just pointing this out because there’s so much room to play with in this area.

Also, Nori, Robert L. Forward’s *Dragon’s Egg *is an excellent look at the idea of a time scale, and size scales as well, grossly different from ours.
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Thanks! That sounds awesome and fascinating! Will definitely check it out.